Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America” (1971) stands as a seminal text of postcolonial studies in Latin America. In this and other articles from the same period, the Cuban poet and literary critic analyzes the fraught relation between Latin America’s hybrid national cultures and the European heritage that remains a fundamental element of those cultures, acting as a constant reminder of the colonial past. In discussing the post-colonies’ problematic and indissoluble bond with the former colonizer’s culture, Retamar turns to the metaphor of Caliban—the subjugated indigenous character from an American island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who expresses in a European language his repudiation of the European master who forced that language on him. This presentation historicizes Retamar’s theses as an expression of debates on culture and ideology among artists and intellectuals in the context of the Cuban Revolution’s postcolonial politics in the 1960s-70s. I turn to the repertoire of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba to establish the influence of the Caliban metaphor on the Revolution’s cultural policy and the philosophy of arts organizations from that era. I highlight the choreography of Alberto Méndez’s El río y el bosque (1973), which hybridized ballet and dances from the Afro-Cuban santería religion. Méndez’s ballet evinced the calibanesque strategies through which the Ballet Nacional de Cuba approached two crucial postcolonial challenges: 1) articulating cultural nationalism within a traditionally European genre, and 2) reconciling cosmopolitan and nationalist impulses while avoiding the pitfalls of nativism.